Like many gardeners I am very aware that continuing to use peat based products in our gardens is not sustainable and that we have to find other mediums that will replace them. I have been trying a variety of different peat-free products over the last couple of years. I was contacted by the people at Carbon Gold who produce and sell Biochar products, to see if I wanted to work on a couple of projects with them and I quickly agreed. I am trialling some of their products and their founder, Craig Sams, kindly agreed to answer The Questions.
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| Photo c/o Carbon Gold |
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1 |
In which garden do you feel happiest? |
Apart from Great Dixter, where else but my own? We have a lovely ½ acre walled garden on a gentle
hillside with a huge, sprawling 200 year old mulberry tree, raised bed
potagers and a lot of other fruit including plums, a greengage, apples,
raspberries, pears and wild strawberries.
Ruled over by a gigantic gunnera that needs to be regularly cut back
or it would consume the whole garden |
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2. |
If you could only have five garden-related tools, which
would they be? |
Watering can, trowel, fork, secateurs, dibber |
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3. |
If you could only have five garden-related books, which
would they be? |
The Climate Change Garden,
A Year Full of Flowers, Down The Garden Path, The Well-Tempered Garden |
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4. |
What was the most defining moment in your life so far? |
1965, soon to graduate. Visiting The Paradox macrobiotic restaurant
in New York’s East Village and realising instantly that what I really wanted
to do with my life was to create a place like it in London. That led to a career in natural and organic
food retail, wholesale and manufacturing.
(Yoko Ono was working at the Paradox in 1965, then moved to London and
became a regular customer in both our restaurants). |
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5. |
What are you most proud of? |
Green & Black’s chocolate. The 70% was a pioneering high-quality
product that, in the words, on the once-off Academy of Chocolate award, was
for: ‘Changing the way people think about chocolate.’ It was also the first ever Fairtrade Mark
product and made a big difference to the lives of cacao farmers. It was an
example to large chocolate companies that led to them doing good (and doing
well) too. |
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6. |
If you won the lottery, what would you do? |
Carry on doing what I am doing until the money runs out
(The standard farmer’s reply to that question) |
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7. |
Who are your garden heroes (no more than three)? |
Arit Anderson, Vita Sackville West, Sarah Raven (with a
nod to her mother Faith Raven, who designed the stunning gardens at
Ardtornish) |
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8. |
What skill would you like to learn and why? (does not have
to be garden related). |
Singing. I am having
singing/songwriting lessons and there’s a great keyboard player with a
recording studio in Blackheath who wants to make a few recordings with me. Watch this space! |
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9. |
If you could visit any garden right this minute, which one
would it be? |
Sissinghurst. I
haven’t been for more than a decade and love its history. Charleston would be a close runner up. |
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10. |
What is your current plant obsession? |
Dandelions. I
collect seed from admirable specimens wherever I go and then propagate them
in our potager. (I eat a lot of
dandelion leaves and drink dandelion root coffee). My great-uncle Murray Toney lived to be 112
and had a cataract operation when he was 103.
I asked him what difference it made being able to see again and he
replied ‘I can see and pick dandelion leaves for my salads.’ Dandelions are all female, so they don’t
cross-pollinate, but they do evolve epigenetically. I am encouraging my
collection to do this by manipulating their growing environment and am now
getting some pretty interesting specimens. |
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11. |
Which garden tool is never far from your hand? |
Secateurs. We also
have a small woodland. Secateurs help to create paths through the trees and
thickets - kids love exploring them and I create low level tunnels that add
to the magic |
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12. |
What is your favourite gardening/plant related word? |
Mycorrhizae - if you look at the history of how they
evolved, plants are really just the food-gathering tool of mycorrhizae, just
as we are the food-gathering tool of our gut microbiome. Humbling.
Those microbes have us sussed. |
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13. |
What do you wish you could do better? |
Grafting. We had 20
Saltcote Pippin apple trees grafted last Autumn and I saw how it’s done but didn’t
get the hands-on experience. |
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14. |
What is the most important lesson you have learned so far? |
Compost, compost, compost. Give Nature the tools and let her do the heavy work. Even too much weeding disturbs the growth
of plants and the soil microbiome - benign neglect can often be better than
active interference. |
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15. |
What makes a perfect day for you? |
Get up and catch up on Scrabble and FB and FT and my work. Then, late morning, to take a slice of
bread and mayonnaise and have a light breakfast/early lunch in the garden with
bits of whatever’s up (mostly dandelion, rocket, nasturtium, marigold,
rosemary). An afternoon swim (the sea
is 5 minutes away) and a nap in the sunshine. Then round off my day with a wander
up the hill and watch the sun’s last moments from the cliffs. |
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16 |
If you had one piece of advice to offer to someone what
would it be? |
All plants like carbon dioxide. I breathe on them regularly, it’s like
feeding them candy. The Prince of
Wales is alleged to talk to his plants but I suspect what they really like is
that human breath is 100 times richer in CO2 than the atmosphere. |
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17. |
Gnome or no gnome? |
Blush, blush. Do I have to say? |
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